soooo for us less informed, why would you use this particular emulator over regular mame? you can adjust the emulation speed in it too, in fact in the slider controls the main cpu is already at 74% by default, the significance of which i don’t know but if i crank it up to 100% the game speeds up quite a bit.

This version of MAME was designed by the shmup community for the sole purpose of reducing input delay. So for all intents and purposes, their version of mame works perfectly with what fighting game enthusiasts look for in an emulator as well.

The main goal of this fork is to remove the delay caused by frame/sprite buffer
emulation in the various mame drivers, the result is that games respond faster
by at least one frame. The downside is that the background layer will not be completely
synced with the sprite layer. That being said, if you want the game to feel like
it does in an arcade setting, the benefits of this build far outweights the slight
visual downsides. The list of drivers with loer latency/input lag is at the end of this file.

What we need to do now is what DGV and I talked about in a thread on here one time, and make a PS/2 Keyboard Arcade stick to avoid USB input lag.

Man, I headed down this path a little while back. Its not difficult to do, from a building perspective…BUT its difficult to locate a modern motherboard that has a ps/2 port that isn’t tied to its USB controller.

just to verify the claim of shmupmame having 1 frame less lag, I did a control test of
mame 0148 + 2012 macbook air => mini-displayport-to-vga => CRT at 800x600
mame has consistently 1 more frame than shmupmame

shmupmame + 2012 macbook air => macbook lcd at 1440 x 900 native resolution
half of them were 4 frames and half of them were 5 frames
average 4.5 which is extremely good.
not to mention portable!
(we played a bunch at NCR using this setup)

Hi,
I want to test input lag for various systems like NKI did here
[media=youtube]JoJzobmdGzU[/media]
I want to test arcade ST, fba (ggpo) on windows7 / XP, Xbox HDR classic mode, PS2 AE capcore
I have a TE w/ MC Cthulhu but I’m not exactly sure how to hook up the LED to my stick, but I guess it should be fairly straight forward.
Can someone help? Thanks.

One more update regarding playing laggy online matches using laggy monitor with a laggy emulator.

As shown above, final burn alpha has 2 more frames of input lag when playing offline on a lagless CRT.

2/60 = you are deprived of 3.33% of a second to react to any moves.

Stage time for ggpo final burn alpha turbo 2/1/0

turbo 2 (52.5 seconds)

turbo 1 (53.9 seconds)

turbo 0 (55.1 seconds)

With turbo speed set to turbo 1, the game is 2.67% slower overall. But it still does not feel as responsive as arcade.
With turbo speed set to turbo 0, the game is 4.95% slower overall, you have enough time to react but your input will still come out slower.

And that was for offline.

When online lag comes into play, you can see that playing at a slower turbo setting will be better.

HUGE thanks to Papasi for conducting all of these tests. This could definitely be an ideal solution for all those who wish to organize an ST event locally or at a major but do not have access to arcade equipment. All that’s really needed is further playtesting. This is where the ST community comes to play. If we can get some thorough playtesting amongst the entire community we can easily come to find the best settings that match the arcade pcb identically. Case in point, Papasi mentioned at 99% Speed on T2 (US version) seems to be the best to mirror the US board, whereas on 97% speed on T3 (JPN version) seems to mirror the JPN board on my end.

At present based off Pap’s test, ShmupMame is REALLY close to matching the PCB in terms of input lag. It’s actually even more responsive than the DC version. So what that actually means in terms of practical use --> Shmupmame 4.2 + Evo Asus monitor = roughly around 1 frame above Arcade, which is exactly the DC version (DC = +1 frame compared to Arcade). This already places the setup well ahead of Classic Mode (360) and even better than DC, since that version is actually constrained to a CRT, not unless one uses the VGA Box for DC (which looks extremely pixelated). Of course, we as the community can strive for even better than just settling with 1 frame (which is really good btw!), by opting to use a better LCD than the Evo Asus(there are quite a few listed on the sub-1frame monitor thread via Tech Talk). There’s even the possibility that the emulator can actually match the board 100% by just adjusting more settings within the Emulator…we just need more people to actually test and compare notes =)

What we need to do now is what DGV and I talked about in a thread on here one time, and make a PS/2 Keyboard Arcade stick to avoid USB input lag.

The only problem with the PS/2 Keyboard route is that it is limits who can utilize their own hardware. Sure the organizer can have a few modified keyboard arcade sticks, but that does not solve the issue of allowing players to use their own stick/pad and in essence, forces a particular controller on the players. This method is also what limited the supergun route in terms of flexibility, until Undamned changed everything by releasing his consolised CPS2 setup and usb jamma adapters.

Regarding USB input lag…has it been 100% confirmed that all arcade usb sticks actually poll at 125 hz (8ms) on a pc? I did the USB poll rate hack (which for some reason only recognizes my MadCatz SFxTekken stick, but not my modded sticks via PS360 chip) and I didn’t notice any difference between playing at 1000hz (1ms) or the default 125hz. Which makes me wonder if either:

What we need to do now is what DGV and I talked about in a thread on here one time, and make a PS/2 Keyboard Arcade stick to avoid USB input lag.

The only problem with the PS/2 Keyboard route is that it is limits who can utilize their own hardware. Sure the organizer can have a few modified keyboard arcade sticks, but that does not solve the issue of allowing players to use their own stick/pad and in essence, forces a particular controller on the players. This method is also what limited the supergun route in terms of flexibility, until Undamned changed everything by releasing his consolised CPS2 setup and usb jamma adapters.

Regarding USB input lag…has it been 100% confirmed that all arcade usb sticks actually poll at 125 hz (8ms) on a pc? I did the USB poll rate hack (which for some reason only recognizes my MadCatz SFxTekken stick, but not my modded sticks via PS360 chip) and I didn’t notice any difference between playing at 1000hz (1ms) or the default 125hz. Which makes me wonder if either:

I’ve never seen any CONFIRMATION of the arcade stick poll rate. Would love to. Right now, if playing on the computer, I use a separate USB controller for gaming (have a bunch of stuff plugged into my “main” usb controller).

Killer thread… great contribution as always, you rule paps, too bad i only play offline st like 1 time in a month sometimes every two months, it sucks i know , anyway i have to download this when i get home and give it a try.

You can change the default roms dir by opening up MameGUI.exe in the shmupmame folder and going to Options -> Directories -> MAME Paths or by editing mame.ini once that file is generated.

Weird things about changing the options in MameGUI, though… once you edit an option you have to at least select or go to another option for it to save the field you just changed. And if an ini file was already generated for whatever game you’re trying to edit, it doesn’t seem to save the new option at all… so you either edit it in the game’s ini or just delete it and start fresh.